This relates to circuitry for performing cryptographic operations, and more particularly, to circuitry for performing cryptographic hashing operations for mining digital currencies.
Digital currencies serve as a digital medium of exchange in which the digital currencies may be transferred in exchange for goods and services. Crypto-currencies are examples of digital currencies in which cryptography governs the creation and exchange of value. An example of a crypto-currency is the bitcoin cryptocurrency that is governed by the Bitcoin protocol. This is in contrast to traditional mediums of exchange that are governed, for example, by a central authority.
The Bitcoin protocol defines a system in which the creation and distribution of the bitcoin cryptocurrency is governed by consensus among a peer-to-peer network. The network maintains a public ledger in which new transactions are verified and recorded by members of the network via cryptography. The operations of verifying and recording transactions of cryptocurrencies such as transactions in the bitcoin cryptocurrency are sometimes referred to as mining, because completion of each mining operation typically rewards the miner with newly created cryptocurrency (e.g., bitcoins). Verified transactions and newly created bitcoins are recorded in the public ledger. The public ledger serves as an official history of transactions. The amount of cryptocurrency owned by any entity may be determined from the public ledger.
Bitcoin mining operations involve identifying a solution to a cryptographic puzzle in which transactions that are to be verified form part of the puzzle parameters. Bitcoin mining operations are typically performed via brute-force techniques (e.g., an exhaustive search for a puzzle solution performed across all possible solutions). Searching for solutions to the cryptographic puzzle involve performing cryptographic hashing functions and other cryptographic operations that are often computationally taxing. The difficulty of the cryptographic puzzle has led to the use of dedicated circuitry designed specifically for Bitcoin mining. Such dedicated circuitry can be expensive to design, purchase, and operate.
It may therefore be desirable to provide improved systems and methods for performing cryptographic operations and for verifying the solutions generated from the cryptographic operations.